


a bottle of french champagne

by crownuponherhead



Series: jonsa historical event [3]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War II, F/M, POV Switches, Sansa-centric, but like jon is very obviously a big part of it?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 06:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15042314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownuponherhead/pseuds/crownuponherhead
Summary: no one thought paris would fall. it didn’t literally fall, there was no dramatic crushing of buildings like in london. fall it did though.a parisian occupation/post wwii au for the jonsa historical event.





	a bottle of french champagne

**Author's Note:**

> ok first i did my very best to keep this as real without being offensive as possible. i've been reading 'les parisiennes' by anne sebba slowly since the beginning of april and highly recommend it. it's about women in paris during the war so using stuff from that i've tried to give it a vibe from that book, which is fascinating. it speaks about women from all over paris and how they were affected or not affected or their decisions. but it kinda of follows sansa's actual story going to stay with cersei, losing arya, being stuck with cersei. 
> 
> also i literally cringe reading first person so i don't know why i wanted to write it??? but i wanted to do something where it was sansa writing her account. i think i was also inspired by a memoir of a french victim of the holocaust i read in paris at park honoring the victims near notre dame called 'but you did not come back' by marceline loridan-ivens. it's a very quick 90 page read but it will make you cry i def recommend it though. 
> 
> also also there is only hints of non con/rape so i decided to put the tag there??? the most graphic thing in this is a sentence long describing a death that's it. 
> 
> also also also i forgot to mention ages but sansa is 23 in 1947 and jon is 25. 
> 
> p.p.p.p.s. was also influenced by suite francaise minus the love affair more the idea of a woman being displayed in the war with someone who isn't very pleased she's there.

 

**Nineteen Forty Seven, United Kingdom.**

“I’m trying to write it again!” She comes in a flurry of red hair and her skirts swishing around her. Jon watches as his wife practically throws the notebook and pencil onto the table. He knows what she means. Ever since they met on VE-Day, her smile and joy in her heartbroken blue eyes reminding him so much of his fallen friend Robb almost enough to make him forget the pain in his still healing arm, she’s wanted to write it. He shouldn’t be surprised, she’s an author after all. Sansa’s children books are the talk of the world they’re a joy no one would expect from someone who lives through what she did.  He remembered the day he realized why she reminded him so much of Robb, when they moved in together seeing the worn and torn picture of the Stark family. It wasn’t proper, but she didn’t have anyone else left to remember what was or wasn’t proper and he couldn’t care anymore. Their whole courtship was improper for a girl with the status she used to have. Her home was in a pile of rubble, her parents bodies had been dragged from under it during the war, so a neighbor told her when she returned. Jon knew he’d seen his demons on the field but Sansa had lived through it too. 

 

Setting their six month year old son, Robb, on a blanket on the floor, Jon stood up to where he was standing behind but not touching his wife. “Maybe you should write it, but not just the bad stuff. Maybe you should write the whole story from being a little girl in Kensington to Moving to Paris with Arya for schooling to surviving to escaping to now where we’re happy with a baby and hopefully another on the way soon. If not another at least the soon will be Bran and Rickon living here with us. That itself is happy enough to get through it, you don’t have to publish it, just write it.” 

 

It’s Sansa who makes the move leaning back into his open arms. “Okay.” 

 

She’s started it and stopped it thirteen times. Each time it always starts the same: 

 

_ No one thought Paris would fall. It didn’t literally fall, there was no dramatic crushing of buildings like in London. Fall it did though. Robert Baratheon told father we’d be safe. We weren’t. After two years of living in the same home as them, you’d think that Cersei Baratheon would have warmed up. She hadn’t, even with mother and father wiring money, we were too much. It’s hard to see how we could be too much to a family of Nazi Sympathizers that continued to maintain wealthy status until the Allies won. We were though. The day Arya ran off is the most vivid, her backpack packed and hair cut short as she went to join the resistance. I still don’t know if she’s alive. I saw glimpses of her in the four years of occupation. Once she even gave me a smile before slipping back through an alley way towards Le Marais.  _

 

“It’s good, Sans.” 

 

“You can’t call the war good.” 

 

“I’m not but the story, your story, how you write it, how it’s helping you it’s good.”

 

He’s reading page 35, she’s only at the day the Armistice was signed and hadn’t even gotten to anything too terrible but she knows deep down he’s write. It’s helping her, it’s helped her think and remember her family. If she counted all the pages she’d just typed up of old stories of her family she’d be on page 100 but some of those are just for her and the boys. Folding another one of the boys shirts she sighs a bit looking out the window to the backyard. Robb’s down for a nap but Rickon is running around the backyard excited as can be as his ninth birthday approaches, Bran reads under the tree his 12th birthday having passed before they moved in with them. He was two when she left for Paris in 1938. Bran only three years older than him remembered her the October day in 1944 when she ran into the Osha’s home in Northern Scotland pulling her brother’s into her arms. Rickon didn’t know who she was besides from the piles of pictures they had. Mum and Dad had sent them up north well prepared, heirlooms, photographs, diaries, and such in their belongings along with years of Robb’s old clothes. 

 

It’s one of her older brother’s shirts she folds now, she remembers him wearing it when he was Rickon’s age and played with her in the garden of their home in Kensington. 

 

“Is it helping me or are they helping me?” She questions. Jon follows his line of sight, he’s not looking forward to where her writing will go. They already haunt her dreams how will she react when she puts it into words. The doctors said it could help her though, help her realize that her hurt is of value to. They both remember the sights they’d seen of those who were worse off than them both. Some of his fellow men dead or worse. They both had friends die and almost her entire family gone too. He’d been on the field, he’d seen things he never wanted to see, emaciated bodies, they woke him up at night in a sweat still. Putting down the last of the pages he was reading he moved to wrap his arms around her. 

 

“I think it helps you but all of us together is helping us all.” She moved at his words and pressed a kiss to his jaw. 

 

“You were right. I needed to start writing it.”

 

“No matter how long it takes, I’ll stick with you.” 

 

_ I lost my virginity in drunk of german champagne being watched as Joffrey tried to prove himself. I didn’t cry, didn’t respond, just layed there. It wasn’t even a year into the occupation. There was a party at the Baratheon home where near the Place de Vosges, everyone was dressed to the nines, the high up German officials flaunting their arm bands, the bright red and black still a haunting memory. Cersei had let me wear one of her gowns from the 30’s and I’d managed to make it look fashionable enough to not be embarrassing. I don’t know why but something in my gut told me looking like I didn’t belong was more dangerous than the fact that I didn’t and hated that I was here. I wanted to go home, but home was already gone. A picture of our street had been in paper it was all rubble. Cersei had pinched my cheeks to add color and called me a sad little dove before pouring me some wine. You see while I may have had a crush on Joffrey when I first got to France in the fall of 1938 by the time it was early 1941 I couldn’t stand him. Cersei never thought I was good enough for him anyway, some English girl who couldn’t stand the heat.  _

 

_ I survived her.  _

 

“Are you sure?” He asks again even as their loading their suitcases into the cab. They haven’t been back down to London since they moved to Edinburgh. He’d gotten a job there and she’d been desperate to try and get to a place where Bran and Rickon could live with them where they wouldn’t be completely uprooting them. 

 

“Rickon deserves to see it, Bran too, besides you already told your father and his family we would be there.” He knows Sansa’s right but as she puts the typewriter into the cab he freezes a bit. 

 

“You’re going to write when we’re down there?” She seems a bit hesitant at his reaction and Bran running up holding Robb in his hands seems to be her saving grace.    
  


“Yes, I’m only at  August of 1942 besides even if I don’t write that I need to get another book in to the publishers soon.” He watches as his wife gracefully takes their son into her arms and tells the boys to finish what she was doing with a kiss to both of their heads. “Jon, you have to let your father at least try and he is trying.” 

  
  


_ I used to go to Notre Dame to pray. I don’t know what I was praying for, I was just praying. I’d sink to my knees in the nave and pray. A lot of people did, I wouldn’t take the metro back either I’d walk. It was on one of those walks I lost the appetite to pray. I walked the way past Hotel de Ville instead of across the island. Entering the Marais and walking up Rivoli, I instantly remembered why I never walked up that way. I felt alone surrounded by German soldiers. Ones who liked to make themselves too friendly. Ones who continued to make themselves too friendly, that would walk me back to the Baratheon home, ones that would befriend Joffrey,  ones that took liberties with no one there to stop them. I stopped praying then. I stopped crying. I stopped speaking unless spoken to. _

 

He has never been more thankful that his deadbeat father was loaded than now. Staying in a guest house instead of a single room but only because the boys aren’t seeing her cry. Sansa’s sat at the desk in the room, diligently typing, occasionally letting a sniffle out. He sits beside her on a stool, hand on her back as she types. He reads every word. Some of them he feels fury inside him, others his heart breaks. She’s said it to him before, that she’ll never go back to Paris. As reads her story over her shoulder pressing a soft kiss to her forehead he’s more sure she never will. 

 

“Do you think I should publish it?” Her voice is small and he’s just in shock not even to liberation and she has a whole novel, except it happened to her. 

 

“If you want to.” He knows her answer before she speaks up. 

 

“Other’s suffered more, I have no reason to complain.” 

 

_ I thought the worst night of my life was when I lost my virginity. I was wrong. I don’t think I could pick a night. A series of them, separated by nights that were fine that their memory blurred into oblivion. For months if it wasn’t a bad night then it was a reprieve but those weren’t good anyway. It started ringing in the New Year for 1943 and it ended only when De Gaulle walked down the Champs Elysee. It’s too much to think about these, months, nights of those days really, but I do. I lived it. I survived it. And it is so little compared to what others lost.  _

 

“So Jon, how did you and your lovely wife meet?” He looks over at his father’s wife, Elia, is her name. She’s kind and seems to be genuine person despite the pain that his existence must have caused her. He follows her gaze to where Sansa sits on the floor with little Robb making the room fill with joyous sound of baby laughs. 

 

“We met in Green Park on VE Day. I was nursing an injury and got sent home instead of moving inward. She was carrying a bottle of Champagne in a pretty dress and there was smile on her face. She just reminded me of someone I lost, turns out she had lost him too. It wasn’t until I’d already proposed we realized that we were talking about the same Robb, her brother.”

 

He turns back from staring at his wife to Elia wondering what her reaction is, she only nods a bit. “I knew her mother, we were both in the Mothers’ Union. I think she’d be very proud of her daughter.”

 

“I think she would be too.” 

 

Elia turned to look at him, something about the look on his face made his stomach flip. “Jon, I know we’ve not known each other long but getting to know you and seeing you two raise your own adorable son and those two boys. I’m proud of you too. I know your father is too.” 

 

For the first time ever, he hugs his step-mother. Maybe Sansa was right. 

 

_ August 24th of 1944 was the longest day of my life. I sat there alone listening to the gun shots and tanks only blocks away at the Grand Palais. This was it it. I would either leave or the last thing I’d ever see would be Cersei Baratheon’s obnoxious painting of a Lion. The Baratheon’s had escaped hoping their connections they made with the German’s would help them. I walked past Joffrey’s body outside on the pavement when I left the home the next day. There was a bullet in his head. The streets were filled in awe. I made it to London by September 14th.  _

 

“I for one think that the Princess’ wedding will do the country some good. She’ll be Queen one day, it’s a celebration we need. It’s not like they’ll be inviting any of the Nazi’s.” He’s absolutely amazed Sansa can even form those words, then again he remembers the line they had to even get married in a town hall. The joy from that bond. 

 

“Sansa’s right, it will be good the economy. Think of how many tourists it’ll bring in, besides won’t that do your business good too?” From the look Sansa gives him he knows he pushed a line but he doesn’t step back. 

 

“Speaking of business, how would you feel about coming to work for it. Work for the family, start creating your own legacy. You’d be able to keep your family more than stable and they’d be around a family too.” 

 

Sansa’s hand on his thigh is the only thing that calms him down at his father’s offer. 

 

“It’s something I’ll have to think about.” 

 

_ I met the love of my life on VE Day. His arm was in a sling, but he wore his uniform and I caught him staring at me as I laughed and split a bottle of champange with Jeyne Poole, one of my only child friends left I could find. She fell for an America soldier and left for the states. I remember the look in his eyes, like he was searching for a ghost. The way he came up to me is something I’ll never forget. He looked bashful but confident enough to approach.  _

 

_ “I’m Jon.” _

 

_ “Sansa,” I don’t know what possessed me to but I stared across at this man with soft smile and dark curly hair. I pushed the bottle ahead of me and cocked my head to the side laughing. “Champagne? It’s French, not any of that nasty German stuff.”  _

 

_ I’d kept my 6 years in France to myself for the entire year I’d been working and sending money back to the boys. That night as we laughed and danced and drank champagne. I knew I was going to fall in love if I hadn’t already. We got married in town hall the next month, young and desperate to live life after years in pain. _

 

“A World Without Love.” Shaking his head Jon smiled up at his wife placing a hand on the small bump of her stomach. “You really wrote something amazing.” He fiddles with the pages of the manuscript with his free hand. 

 

“I’m not publishing it, not yet. I don’t want to not until the boys are older, our kids our older, where we can talk about our hardships with them before they could find a book. I might not ever publish it, leave it to them to decide when we’re gone.” 

 

Pressing a kiss to her lips, Jon pulled her onto his lap wrapping his arms around her. “Sounds brilliant.” Looking over her shoulder he watched as little Robb teetered around on his feet chasing after Rickon, Bran sat at the tree with his books, the Garden at their home in London is smaller. Sansa didn’t want to live in Kensington again, but they take the boys to Hyde Park like her parents used to do for them. 

 

“Jon?” 

 

“Yes, love?” 

 

“I can’t believe we really found happiness.” 

 

“We did though.” 


End file.
